This Blog is dedicated to my progress in any of my tools/games/projects in GM or anything that I feel is directly associated with them.

Monday, June 13, 2011

The 3D Skeleton Animator

This is where the magic happens. Right as I'm typing this, I'm finishing it up and squashing the bugs.

Model shown with applied stretching

This program takes what we finished in the other program and adds some motion. You edit each part over the frames by editing the rotation vector and how much it should be rotated by, there's also another localz rotation (called turn) that allows for smoother tweens.

Tween Window shown with momentum tween with alterations

Speaking of Tweens: the tweening in this program is incredibly powerful and customizable. There are four built-in algorithms (linear,exponential,logarithmic,momentum) which you can add and even then you can physically alter the tween graph.
It also comes with other functions and doohickeys, like:

Onion Skin enabled animation

Remapping Skeletons

Onion Skins

Flipping

Animation loops

Skeleton Offset

Adding Animations

Splitting Animations

Split Tweening

And once you've finished making the animation, you can compile which adds the animations, skeleton class, and the components to growing pool of game resources.

Frame selection expanded

I'm quite happy with it. Even though the interfaces between the programs aren't the greatest, I'm proud of the accomplishments made under the hood.
I think maybe the next post will involve the game engine, but as of writing this, I haven't started, yet.

Heh. Yeah. I needed a program in which I could add the features I needed, and whose output I could control. It was a long process, and even now it's not complete, but it's at a usable state. Once I fix the mannequin I'll see if I can churn out some animations.

-Wow what a hassle to make a comment. Comments don't even work in Google Chrome. How wonderful. >.> Anyway, thanks for stopping by, I hope I'll have new stuff up everyonce in a while.